The sys admin's daily grind — PomodoPi
Green Garden
Charly starts the tomato and dill season aboveground with a traffic light and underground with a soaker hose, along with assistance from two gardeners and the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi board.
Truth be told, I have ignored my garden for the past 15 years. This year, however, I set myself the task of growing my own tomatoes and herbs, and I wrote on Twitter about possible technical support for my green thumb. This was duly noted by gardeners Vanessa Giese and Pia Reichert in their blog [1]. Shortly thereafter, I was a guest author for the "Garden Nerds" column.
My first step was to plan automatic irrigation. My daily bread as a sys admin is to automate routine tasks with bits of technology, so I searched and found a soldering iron and tied a capacitive humidity sensor up to an A/D convertor using a Raspberry Pi. This setup provides me with data about the soil moisture in the plant pot every minute [2].
My Raspberry-to-garden adapter forms the second phase: I have a short hose running from the faucet in the garden to a solenoid valve. While the Raspberry Pi has 12 volts at its terminals, it lets water through, which flows into a perforated hose that I have looped through my raised bed. The tomatoes will put down roots there as soon as the danger of frost is over. When I wrote this article, however, they were enjoying their winter quarters in my living room (Figure 1).
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
There's a New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle is a Linux AI assistant that can work with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
-
FreeBSD Promises a Full Desktop Installer
FreeBSD has lacked an option to include a full desktop environment during installation.
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.